Tag: police state

Florida Senate Committee Unanimously Passes Bill To Restrict Hemp-Derived Products With New THC Limits

Ashley Guy runs a smoke shop in Tallahassee. She says she’s thrived since she moved from Seattle to Florida five years ago, with profits of more than $5 million from the sales of cannabis hemp products. But if a new proposal in the Florida Legislature passes, “this would just decimate business” she said on Tuesday.

She added that if the caps on THC—the compound in the plant associated with getting you high—on hemp products were imposed, customers would simply buy multiple packages of “gummies,” or would buy higher-dose products online from other states.

Guy and other hemp entrepreneurs are back in the legislature in 2024, fighting again to ensure they can continue to make a living in the hemp industry. But on Tuesday, lawmakers in a committee decided to impose restrictions on hemp products and substantially regulate the hemp market in Florida.

That was met with strong opposition by members of the industry, but nonetheless, the legislation (SB 1698) passed unanimously in the Senate Agriculture Committee. (Keep in mind that lawmakers in the House and Senate need to agree to be able to pass the legislation.)

The measure is being sponsored by Polk County Republican Colleen Burton.

It would make a number of changes to the hemp industry in the state, which has operated legally since 2019, shortly after the passage of the 2018 U.S. Farm Bill. That bill made hemp production and distribution legal under federal law and allowed states to create such programs. The Farm Bill defined hemp as the cannabis plant with one key difference: hemp cannot contain more than 0.3 percent of THC.

The most lucrative part of the hemp industry has involved the production of biomass that contains cannabidiol (CBD), a non-psychoactive compound believed to treat health conditions like anxiety, stress, anxiety and inflammation.

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Oregon lawmakers now want to recriminalize possession of small amounts of drugs after facing rampant public drug use

Lawmakers in Oregon are moving to recriminalize the possession of small amounts of drugs after it faced rampant public drug use and saw overdose-related deaths more than triple.

‘It’s the compromise path, but also the best policy that we can come up with to make sure that we are continuing to keep communities safe and save lives,’ State Senator Kate Lieber, a Democrat and one of the bill’s authors, said. 

The state became the first in the country to decriminalize the possession of all drugs including heroin and cocaine in 2020.

But residents have since demanded for politicians to take action on the open-air drug markets that surfaced and fueled a homelessness crisis. Oregon has struggled to deal with the crisis as photos and video show tent cities and rampant public drug use. 

Opioid deaths in Oregon more than tripled from 280, before the de-criminalization of drugs was voted in, to 955 in 2022.

The sweeping new bill will recriminalize the possession of small amounts of drugs as a low-level misdemeanor.

The proposal would enable police to confiscate them and crack down on their use on sidewalks and in parks, its authors said.

The measure’s details have yet to be finalized, but ‘personal use’ possession of illegal drugs would become a misdemeanor punishable by up to 30 days in jail or a $1,250 fine. It would not affect Oregon’s legalization of cannabis or psychedelic mushrooms.

That is in stark contrast to how voters felt in 2020 when they passed the pioneering decriminalization law, Measure 110, with 58 percent support.

Democratic legislators who championed the measure as a way to treat addiction as a public health matter, not a crime, are now battling one of the nation’s largest spikes in overdose deaths, intensifying pressure from Republicans and growing calls from a well-funded campaign group to overhaul it.

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Georgia GOP Proposes RICO Expansion for “Loitering” Protesters

WHEN THE STATE of Georgia indictedOpens in a new tab 61 Stop Cop City activists on racketeering charges last year, it mangled the meaning of “racketeering” beyond recognition. In the indictment, prosecutors cited typical social justice activities, such as “mutual aid,” writing “zines,” and “collectivism,” as proof of criminal conspiracy and raising money for protest signs as grounds for money laundering charges.

Just as it seemed that Georgia Republicans couldn’t push the state’s broad Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, statute any further, GOP state senators introducedOpens in a new tab a bill on Friday that would significantly expand the reach of the Georgia RICO law, with blatantly repressive designs.

Former President Donald Trump and his allies currently face the highest profile RICO charges in Georgia for attempting to interfere in the 2020 presidential election. Trump’s case, however, is a political outlier when it comes to the increasedOpens in a new tab deployment of RICO charges in recent years, as it takes aim at a truly powerful cohort engaged in the very paradigm of conspiracy. While this is the purported intention of RICO laws — first introduced in 1970 to target mob bosses — recent uses of Georgia’s statute have involved casting Atlanta public school teachersOpens in a new tab as organized criminals for altering test scores and claimingOpens in a new tab that the lyrics of Black rap artists can indicate potential violent gang involvement.

The newly introduced Senate Bill 359, or S.B. 359, sponsored by 10 Republican state senators, makes clear that the Georgia GOP intends to continue using RICO as a tool for sweeping criminalization and repressive prosecutions. The proposed law would include low-level misdemeanors, such as “loitering” and placing posters in unpermitted places, as crimes to which RICO charges and hefty enhanced penalties could apply. The bill also includes “political affiliation or belief” as a factor for enhanced penalties in certain circumstances.

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Appeals Court: FBI’s Safe-Deposit Box Seizures Violated Fourth Amendment

The FBI violated the Fourth Amendment when its agents rifled through the contents of more than 700 safe-deposit boxes in the aftermath of a March 2021 raid, a panel of federal appeals court judges ruled unanimously on Tuesday.

In doing so, the judges at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed what innocent victims of the raid and their attorneys have been arguing for years: that the FBI overstepped the bounds of its warrant issued in the case and failed to follow proper protocol when federal agents cracked open safe-deposit boxes, ran the contents past drug-sniffing dogs, and tried to seize some of the money and other valuables found in the boxes.

The 9th Circuit’s ruling pivots on a detail of the case that Reason first highlighted more than a year ago: the existence of so-called “supplemental instructions” for the handling of the safe-deposit boxes seized at U.S. Private Vaults in Beverly Hills.

The warrant authorizing the raid expressly forbade federal agents from engaging in a “criminal search or seizure of the contents of the safety [sic] deposit boxes.” Under typical FBI procedure, the boxes should have been taken into custody until they could be returned to their rightful owners. But those “supplemental instructions” drawn up by the special agent in charge of the operation told agents to be on the lookout for cash stored inside the safe-deposit boxes and to note “anything which suggests the cash may be criminal proceeds.”

It is “particularly troubling,” wrote Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. in Tuesday’s ruling, that the government was unable to provide any “limiting principle to how far a hypothetical ‘inventory search’ conducted pursuant to customized instructions can go.”

Elsewhere in the ruling, Smith theorized that if a government agency were “given the discretion to create customized inventory policies” for “each car it impounds and each person detained, the ensuing search stops looking like an ‘inventory’ meant to simply protect property and looks more like a criminal investigation of that particular car or person, i.e, more like a ‘ruse.'”

“If there remained any doubt whether the government conducted a ‘criminal search or seizure,’ that doubt is put to rest by the fact that the government has already used some of the information from inside the boxes to obtain additional warrants to further its investigations and begin new ones,” Smith wrote.

“The Ninth Circuit today held that the FBI violated the Fourth Amendment rights of hundreds of people by breaking into their safe deposit boxes to try to forfeit everything worth taking,” Robert Frommer, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, a libertarian legal nonprofit that represented some of the plaintiffs in the case, tells Reason. He said the case should bring renewed attention to a congressional proposal to reform federal forfeiture laws in order to “stop federal cops from continuing to act like robbers.”

A spokesperson for the FBI declined to comment on the ruling and referred the matter to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which did not respond to Reason’s request for comment.

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Pennsylvania District Attorney Sues Federal Government Over Gun Ban For Medical Marijuana Patients

A Pennsylvania district attorney and gun rights advocates have filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to overturn the ban preventing medical marijuana patients from buying and possessing firearms—the latest in a series of legal challenges to the policy.

Warren County, Pennsylvania District Attorney Robert Greene, a registered medical cannabis patient in the state, teamed up with the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) to file suit against the federal government in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania on Tuesday.

This comes as the question over the constitutionality of the federal gun ban for people who use marijuana is now before the U.S. Supreme Court, which is considering taking up the issue.

The new lawsuit names U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, as well as the heads of the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), as defendants. This represents what the lead attorney for the plaintiffs believes to be the first civil, rather than criminal, challenge to the federal statute.

Greene’s participation in the case is especially notable. The court filing states that the local prosecutor “intends to lawfully purchase, possess, and utilize firearms and ammunition so that he may exercise his constitutional right to keep and bear arms for self-defense and all other lawful purposes.” But he’s barred from doing so under federal statute because of his status as a state-certified medical cannabis patient.

The prosecutor announced late last month that he will not be seeking re-election and will be turning his focus to advocacy on medical cannabis patient rights issues.

Unlike the various previous court cases challenging the constitutionality of the gun ban for plaintiffs who have been criminally prosecuted, with a civl suit like this, “you’re looking at a challenge on behalf of people that are just asserting that this prohibition is unconstitutional, either on its face or as applied—’as applied’ meaning to that individual only,” Adam Kraut, lead attorney for the plaintiff and executive director of SAF, told Marijuana Moment on Tuesday.

“What I’m hoping is not only to win in our lawsuit, but that it sparks the federal Congress to do something and solve this problem because you have millions of Americans who are disenfranchised from their Second Amendment rights, being forced to choose either between treating their symptoms with medical marijuana or exercising their constitutionally guaranteed right,” he said. “That’s not an acceptable.”

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Facial recognition used after Sunglass Hut robbery led to man’s wrongful jailing, says suit

A 61-year-old man is suing Macy’s and the parent company of Sunglass Hut over the stores’ alleged use of a facial recognition system that misidentified him as the culprit behind an armed robbery and led to his wrongful arrest. While in jail, he was beaten and raped, according to his suit.

Harvey Eugene Murphy Jr was accused and arrested on charges of robbing a Houston-area Sunglass Hut of thousands of dollars of merchandise in January 2022, though his attorneys say he was living in California at the time of the robbery. He was arrested on 20 October 2023, according to his lawyers.

According to Murphy’s lawsuit, an employee of EssilorLuxottica, Sunglass Hut’s parent company, worked with its retail partner Macy’s and used facial recognition software to identify Murphy as the robber. The image that was put through the facial recognition system came from low-quality cameras, according to the lawsuit. While Houston police department was investigating the armed robbery, the EssilorLuxottica employee called police to say they could stop the investigation because the employee had identified one of two robbers with the technology. The employee also said the system had pointed to Murphy as committing two other robberies, according to the lawsuit.

When Murphy returned to Texas from California, he went to the department of motor vehicles (DMV) to renew his license. Within minutes of identifying himself to a DMV clerk, Murphy told the Guardian he was approached by a police officer who notified him there was a warrant out for his arrest for an aggravated robbery. Murphy said he was not told any details about his supposed crime except for the date the robbery occurred. He realized he was in Sacramento, California, at the time of the robbery – more than a thousand miles away.

“I almost thought it was a joke,” Murphy said.

Still, he was arrested and taken to the local county jail, where he was held for 10 days before being transferred to and processed in Harris county jail.

After a few days at Harris county, his alibi was confirmed by both his court-appointed defense attorney and the prosecutor, and the charges against him were ultimately dropped, according to the lawsuit.

Murphy was never convicted of a crime. Nonetheless, he says his detainment left him with deep scars. He was brutally beaten and gang-raped by three other men in the jail hours before he was released, he alleges. They threatened to kill him if he tried to report them to the jail staff, according to Murphy. After the alleged attack, Murphy remained in the same cell as them until he was released.

“That was kind of terrifying,” Murphy said. “Your anxiety is up so high, you’re still shaking the entire time. And I just got up on my bunk and just faced the wall and was just praying that something would come through and get me out of that tank.”

“The attack left him with permanent injuries that he has to live with every day of his life,” the lawsuit reads. “All of this happened to Murphy because the Defendants relied on facial recognition technology that is known to be error prone and faulty.”

Murphy did not realize facial recognition technology may have been used as evidence against him until two weeks ago, when he began working with his attorney, Daniel Dutko.

Dutko said he discovered from police documents that the Sunglass Hut worker shared camera footage with Macy’s, which employees from the department store chain used to identify Murphy. After that, Macy’s and Sunglass Hut contacted the police together, according to Dutko. Though Macy’s has retail partnerships with the eyewear brand in several locations, Macy’s had no connection to this robbery as the Sunglass Hut in question is a standalone location, he said.

“We feel very comfortable saying facial recognition software is the only possible explanation, and it’s the only reason why [Sunglass Hut] would go to Macy’s to try to identify him,” Dutko said.

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Trudeau’s Orwellian Attack On Canadian Truckers Declared Unconstitutional

Canada’s Federal Court ruled on Tuesday that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s use of the Emergencies Act in 2022 to punish protesting truckers was both unreasonable and unconstitutional.

“I have concluded that the decision to issue the Proclamation does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness — justification, transparency and intelligibility — and was not justified in relation to the relevant factual and legal constraints that were required to be taken into consideration,” wrote Justice Richard G. Mosley in his ruling.

The decision follows an application for judicial review requested by the Canadian Constitution Foundation, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and various other applicants who cried foul over the use of emergency measures to quell Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa, which allowed the government to freeze the bank accounts of protesters,  conscript tow truck drivers, and arrest people for participating in assemblies deemed illegal by Trudeau’s government.

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Zoning Bans the Good Samaritan

Since March 2023, Chris Avell’s church, Dad’s Place, in Bryan, Ohio, has been keeping its doors open 24/7 for anyone who might stop by to use the church’s kitchen, get food for themselves or their pets from its pantry, or join in church services.

When the homeless shelter next door is full, Dad’s Place will take in some of those people too. Avell considers all these activities a core part of his church’s mission. The city of Bryan, however, considers his sheltering of people an illegal, residential use of a commercially zoned property.

This past New Year’s Eve, when Avell was arriving at the church to preach that Sunday morning, a police officer served him with 18 criminal charges related to violations of the town’s zoning code. Avell pleaded not guilty to those charges earlier this month.

Churches’ charitable activities often don’t fit neatly into zoning codes’ definitions of commercial and residential uses. For that reason, they often get dinged with code violations for doing things like operating a soup kitchen in a residential area or sheltering people in a commercial zone.

The fact that churches are also serving the poor and homeless can make them a target of nuisance complaints from neighbors and extra scrutiny and enforcement from local officials as well.

Bryan’s decision to criminally charge Avell is nevertheless unusually punitive.

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Inside The FBI-Tainted Whitmer ‘Kidnap Plot’ You’ve Heard Almost Nothing About

In a fiery exchange last month, CNN anchorwoman Abby Phillip told GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy that there was “no evidence” to support his claim that federal agents abetted protesters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Ramaswamy shot back that the FBI conspicuously has never denied that law enforcement agents were on duty in the crowd. He argued that federal officials have repeatedly “lied” to the American people about not only that investigation but one that has gotten much less attention: the alleged failed plot to kidnap and kill Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan in 2020.

“It was entrapment,” Ramaswamy said. “FBI agents putting them up to a kidnapping plot that we were told was true but wasn’t.”

His zeroing in on the Michigan case highlighted an uncharacteristic development in contemporary politics, where progressives vigorously defend law enforcement power while conservatives view it with deep suspicion. Further, Ramaswamy’s linking of Jan. 6 and the Whitmer plot resonated with many on the right who want similarities between the two episodes exposed to the general public, especially the FBI’s reliance on informants and other paid operatives.

On Oct. 8, 2020, Whitmer announced the shocking arrests of several men accused of planning to kidnap and possibly assassinate her. The case produced alarming headlines just weeks before Election Day; Democrats, including Whitmer, used news of the plot to blame Trump for inciting violence.

Joe Biden commended the FBI for thwarting the abduction plan and, in a written statement issued the same day, claimed that “there is a through line from President Trump’s dog whistles and tolerance of hate, vengeance, and lawlessness to plots such as this one.” Biden continued that line of attack during campaign speeches in Michigan, a swing state that voted for Trump in 2016, and one Biden needed to capture to win the presidency.

In the years since the election, the national press has given little attention to the case since the initial arrests, even though court documents have recast the episode as something more sinister. Instead of a heroic effort by the FBI to safeguard the country from domestic terrorists, it now appears to have been a broad conspiracy by law enforcement to entrap American citizens who held unpopular political views.

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THE TIMELINE: How the FBI Thwarted the Investigation into the Hacked Georgia Election Machines and Targeted the Whistleblowers Instead

On Friday, in a Federal Court In Atlanta, Georgia, University of Michigan Professor of Computer Science and Engineering J. Alex Halderman testified in front of Judge Amy Totenberg’s courtroom in the Culling vs. Raffensperger lawsuit on the insecure Dominion voting machines used in Georgia elections since 2020.

As reported earlier, during his testimony, Halderman was able to HACK A DOMINION VOTING MACHINE and change the tabulations in front of U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg and the entire courtroom!

Halderman USED ONLY A PEN TO CHANGE VOTE TOTALS!

His testimony was part of a long-running lawsuit by election integrity activists set as a bench trial.

The plaintiffs seek to remove what they say are insecure voting machines in Georgia in favor of secure paper ballots.

This lawsuit was launched after the 2017 Kennesaw State University election hacks in Georgia.

As we continue to follow this explosive lawsuit on election integrity today The Gateway Pundit looked into the FBI’s role in this operation.

We can finally explain what happened over the years.

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